Monthly Archives: October 2007

The second NCT class was last Friday. I started this post about it after that, but haven’t had a lot of time to get it finished (hence the much greater detail about my trip there as compared to the events of the class itself – this was not actually intended to imply anything about the relative importance of the two). Writing it, I found myself choosing between a fairly dull whistle-stop summary of what went on, and one of my looooooonnnnngggggg detailed posting marathons about all the useful tips and bits of information we were given and where they fitted into what I already knew about labour from my previous reading/direct experience. Since the latter would take up a long post in itself (at least), I opted for the dull summary, and since even getting that far has now taken me over a week and I need to leave for the next class in less than an hour I’ll wind this up now, ready or not, and post it.

Radio bulletin semi-heard by me as I was on my way to the class:

"Blah blah roads blah blah traffic blah blah so the nameofmainroad between Townyoulivein and Villageyouarecurrentlygoingto is still completely blocked following the accident earlier. Blah blah other random bits of traffic information have a nice day."

Or something like that. I might not quite have remembered it word for word. However, I heard this while I was actually still on my way out of town and hadn’t yet reached the road in question. It was the only time in my entire life I can ever remember having heard a traffic bulletin at a helpful moment. What was even better was that a few days earlier I’d discovered that a few crucial pages were missing from my existing map book of the area and reluctantly gone to buy another one, only to find that the shop didn’t sell the handy little booklet I’d previously had, containing maps of our town and a few main surrounding ones, and if I wanted a map of the area I was going to have to purchase a rather more extensive atlas. Oh, well – I was in a rush to get Jamie home for his lunch and didn’t want to take the time to go check out the other bookshop in town to see if they had the one I’d originally wanted so I bought the more extensive atlass, figuring it was bound to come in useful some time, and, oh, boy, did it. Armed with that, I successfully plotted a route involving some of those very twisty country lanes that are difficult to navigate even with a good map and near-impossible without one, and still, despite that delay, arrived first at the class. (By a whisker. The second couple were driving up just as I arrived at Philippa’s front door.)

We were a further depleted group that day – Alex had her hospital appointment that morning. Her husband James had to go back to work after that and couldn’t make it at all, but Alex joined us after her appointment to fill us in on the latest. Her Caesarean is indeed booked for the 16th, but, because she has a low-lying placenta and is thus at increased risk of cord prolapse if her waters break unexpectedly, they want her to spend the five days before that in the hospital. This means, alas, she will not make it to either of the final two classes (although, since the class on the 13th is the one that covers Caesareans, she is going to send James along to make notes). Since the next two classes practically coincide with Fiona’s due date, it’s touch and go how many we’ll still have around by the end.

Philippa kicked off this session by asking us to go round and each give our first name and say something about it – what it means, why our parents chose it, or whatever. (I got to show off a bit, as I used to find out the meanings of names as one of my hobbies and a few of them stuck in my head to this day. Of course, it helped that we have a Shaun, a Sean, and a Joanna, all of which derive from John, so knowing that this means ‘grace of God’ got me quite a long way.) Following this, we moved onto the topic of the day, which was the normal process of labour and the ways in which
we could help it along, or at least avoid hindering it.

Philippa laid out a series of pictures illustrating the uterine and cervical changes in the first stage of labour, and we talked about the physical changes and about the kinds of symptoms we might get as our bodies warmed up for labour/started in labour/got into more active labour, with me chiming in enthusiastically with examples from my own experience (occasionally in response to someone actually asking). We went through series (what is the plural, anyway?) of cards with different pre-first-stage and first stage symptoms in order to discuss the kinds of stages at which we might first put in a call to the midwives and/or head on our way to the hospital/birthing unit. (Not a decision at which I excelled last time around, but that’s all part of the story-for-another-day.)

The discussion meandered off along various detours, of which the main one I remember is a chat about where to give birth – as in, which of the local hospitals. We do not seem to be a particularly tree-huggy lot – no home births planned, and I’m the only one who currently has the birthing centre down as a first choice, although some of the others are toying with the idea. For everyone else, the main choice seems to be between the two different hospitals in the area. Which was quite surprising to me – the bit about there being a choice between two hospitals, that is, not the idea that that might be the choice that others would want to opt for. Whenever anyone has mentioned anything about hospital to me, only one has been mentioned, and I’d just assumed that that would be the one I’d go to should it become necessary. Finding out that I could go for a different one is potentially useful to know, although I do hope this particular bit of information will stay firmly at the potentially useful level and that I’ll never need it in practice.

In between all this, we had some excellent banana-and-date cake
which Fiona had baked for us this morning (good grief – I thought I was
being organised getting myself together enough to make myself some
oatmeal before I left) and spent a bit of time hanging out in the garden and chatting. And also admiring the kittens.

After our lunch break, Philippa talked us through a relaxation exercise (good timing – I doubt if I was the only one that dozed off) and then we moved on to a discussion of different positions that are useful in labour. Then we went through second stage, with a similar series of pictures, and then talked about the difference between natural and managed third stages of labour, with a slightly less illustrious hand-drawn series of pictures, and finished off by going round saying what we’d learned during the day that was likely to be useful to us.

As you may well have guessed, I seem to have emerged as the Class Know-it-all. This was fairly inevitable, given that not only am I the only one who has previous personal experience of the whole thing, but I also have at least some professional knowledge (not that GPs deal with childbirth much these days now that the midwives do all the non-complicated stuff, but a few fragments of my obstetrics classes still stick) and I read quite a lot on the topic last time around. Add to this the fact that I’m the sort of person for whom instructions to Use Your Indoor Voice were invented, and you can see that the others probably got heartily sick of hearing me going on. Still, I think I might have partly redeemed myself by killing the wasp. It had flown in when we stopped for our coffee break and was buzzing around annoying me, so the rest of the class were treated to the spectacle of me pounding it into the sofa with my maternity notes, yelling "Die, you wretched creature! Die! Dammit… it’s only stunned…" As a bonus, I apparently managed to maintain an ideal position for labour (standing and bent forward with legs apart) while doing this, as Philippa pointed out. Not that I plan on killing wasps in my next labour – it would be even worse than reading about scalp disorders.

Enough for now – I’ll go get the product of my first labour up and changed and ready before heading off to the next class.

Before getting pregnant this time around, I spent a lot of time thinking about the pros and cons of having twins. As time-wasting pastimes go, I had to admit that this one was somewhere up there just below watching paint dry. In the first place, since I wasn’t planning on fertility treatment, it was an utterly moot point; whatever conclusion I reached, I wasn’t going to be offered a choice in the matter. (Well, except that I did, while Googling on the subject, discover that apparently there is a type of yam that can increase your chances of popping out more than one egg at a time.) And in the second place, I already knew perfectly well what I thought on the subject. The idea of twins used to fascinate me right up until I had one baby, and then I realised that the whole ‘Wow!’ factor of having two babies at a time would not actually make up for the practical realities. Barry was quite in favour of the idea (although that was mainly because he wanted to have identical twin girls so that he could teach them to enact the "Come and play with us, Danny!" scene from The Shining), but I much prefer the idea of having babies one at a time.

It’s not that having a third child would be so terrible, for me at least; it’s that having two at once would, in all sorts of ways both minor and major, impact on my ability to be the mother I wanted to be to either of them, and that’s something that I would find endlessly frustrating and saddening. On top of that, the question of how we’d have coped financially with the extra time I’d almost certainly have had to take off work is one that I’m sure we could have answered if need be, but am glad we didn’t have to. I made sure I steered clear of those yams.

Still, having twins wouldn’t have been a disaster. I wouldn’t have wanted it that way, but if that’s what had happened, I’d have sucked it up, dealt with it, got on with things, and done my best to focus on the benefits – which might not have outweighed the downside in an ideal world, but would nonetheless have been considerable. But if I’d had twins due not to the vagaries of Fate but due to someone’s stupid, careless screw-up? Then I think I’d have been rather less philosophical about the whole thing.

This is the situation faced by a couple in Australia. One of the women (it was a lesbian couple) was undergoing IVF. Having initially signed a form to the effect that the doctor could replace ‘one or two’ embryos on the day of transfer, she then changed her mind and made it explicitly clear just prior to the transfer that she only wanted one replaced. She did not want twins. No, sirree, don’t even joke about it. Only replace one, Doctor. The doctor then failed to pass this rather crucial piece of information on to the embryologist whose job it was to place the appropriate number of embryos into the tube used to introduce them into the womb, and… well, you can guess the rest. Three years after the birth of the consequent twins, their parents are suing the doctor for the extra financial costs involved – medical bills, time off work, and, most of all, the cost of raising an extra child.

I encountered this story via Julie’s post on it. Despite her fears, her post didn’t offend me – in fact, I agreed with quite a bit of it, though not all. Julie’s take on the matter, and one dittoed by many of her commentators, is that she sympathises with the lawsuit but not with the couple’s attitudes as described in the media. This immediately rang alarm bells with me – if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that judging people solely on the picture the media gives us of them is not always such a great idea. This seemed, when I clicked on the links in Julie’s post, to be a typical example. These women seem to have said a couple of things along the way which indeed don’t show them in the best possible light, but which are getting splashed all over the papers devoid of any context or any first-hand information from the women themselves about how they see or are dealing with the whole situation, and that is waaaaay open to potential misinterpretation. Heaven help me if someone ever chooses to do the same with whatever of my comments on life they can get their hands on, because I don’t weigh every word I say before saying it and I don’t like to think about how many statements I may have made along my road in life that really wouldn’t paint me in the best of lights if they were the only information someone had about me.

In this case, the problem appears to have been exacerbated by a case of Chinese whispers. Julie reported one of the women as having claimed that she was ‘traumatised’ by buying a double stroller. Now, I do have to agree that, despite everything I said in the above paragraph, there are some statements that aren’t really excused by any context, and if this woman actually had claimed to have been traumatised by buying baby equipment of whatever variety then I would currently be rolling my eyes and muttering "Get a grip!". However, when I clicked on the link given, I found that the word ‘traumatised’ seems to have been introduced into the discussion by Julie – what the woman is actually quoted as saying is "It was like the last frontier of acceptance to spend hundreds of dollars on a pram". While this is a rather weird way of putting things, I’m guessing that it means something like "last straw", and, if so, then I get that. I can well imagine that if my brain was already swimming with "Oh, no! How long am I going to have to spend on bed rest? How will we make ends meet if I have to take all that time off work? How will I ever manage two babies at once? What’s going to happen when they’re both crying and I can’t deal with both their needs at the same time? Am I ever going to get any sleep again? Oh, bugger that doctor!", then the discovery that I was going to have to spend a few hundred more on a pram than originally budgeted for might be temporarily magnified from a minor and easily shrugged-off setback on life’s bumpy road to a disaster that would reduce me to a sobbing wreck.

I’m a bit baffled, too, as to why it’s supposed to be so terrible that the other mother described her partner as having ‘lost her ability to love’ following the birth of the twins. I do think that post-natal depression – or even stress, burnout, and exhaustion short of depression – can temporarily rob you of your ability to empathise and to respond emotionally to others, and that that’s probably what this woman was describing. And of course that’s all part of what you sign on for when you become a parent, but that doesn’t change the fact that being a parent to twins is that much harder and could well contribute to that result in someone who might have coped perfectly well with only one at a time.

Julie raises the pertinent question of how this lawsuit will someday be perceived by the children in question, given that it revolves around the desirability of the nonexistence of one of them. I agree that this is a big potential issue; I’m not sure I agree that it’s bound to be an actual issue, although everyone else seems to think so. These women are not, after all, going to be saving these press cuttings for the children’s baby book. The twins are three years old right now. By the time they’re old enough to take an interest in such things, the court case will be ancient history. Maybe I’m over-optimistic, but I do think that children can generally grasp the idea that their parents love them very much now even if they didn’t want them initially. I don’t think children look to a years-old court case to draw conclusions about their parents’ attitude towards them; I think that they look to the way their parents have acted towards them day after day after day in those years. (I also wonder if perhaps this couple just didn’t think about the way the media would turn a supposedly anonymous court case into a three-ring circus. If so, then I’ll certainly buy that they’re naive, but not necessarily that they’re terrible parents, or terrible people.)

As I said, Julie’s opinions on these points didn’t offend me – I thought they were quite reasonably expressed. What did offend me, to the point of eventually driving me to write this post despite already having added some lengthy comments to the discussion on Julie’s blog, was the attitude of a lot of her commentators. Partly because I disagreed vehemently with many of the things said, and also partly because of the way so many of those things were being said. ("Money-grubbing assholes" would be a fair summary of much of the commentary.)

For starters, there was the insistence that suffering a particular consequence because of someone’s carelessness can’t possibly raise any moral issues over and beyond suffering that same consequence through sheer bad luck. By that argument, I can stop checking results and prescriptions so carefully – after all, people die of cancer or suffer medication side-effects every day, so what does it matter if a few extra bite the dust because I couldn’t be bothered to pick up warning signs in their results or notice that they’ve been put on medication that’s contraindicated for them? While I’m at it, I’ll stop looking out for pedestrians when I drive. They knew there were risks when they decided to cross that road, so the hell with ’em – they’ve no right to whine and bitch when I run ’em down.

It’s only fair to argue that carelessness is also not the same as malice and that there should probably be limits on the amount that someone should have to pay for a genuine mistake, however stupid. (One could, for example, quite reasonably question whether the doctor really needs to pay the extra child’s way through private school.) But the number of people who seemed to think that the couple should treat medical carelessness as just another part of the risk they accepted when they decided to undergo IVF astonished me. I suppose it at least makes a change from the reverse attitude that crops up so commonly these days – the idea that if anything has gone wrong with your life it must be due to someone’s carelessness and that Someone, Somewhere, had therefore better pay. Heaven knows I don’t have much patience with that attitude, either. But this was a genuine case of someone screwing up. One of the commenters accused the women of having a ‘sense of entitlement’, as though there was something wrong with this under the circumstances. Having a doctor who’s willing to listen to your wishes regarding your treatment and make reasonable efforts to carry them out strikes me as one of the things to which people certainly should be entitled.

Then, there was the attitude that the couple had no right to complain because all they had to do was opt for one of the other options available to them once they discovered the twin pregnancy – you know, one of those many alternatives easy and insignificant enough to be appropriately prefaced by ‘just’. Just selectively reduce! Just have one of the babies adopted! Just get on with it and love them both anyway! With such a range of options available, why would anyone be whiny enough to complain?

Which is a pretty ironic attitude to find on an infertility blog – the place of all places where advice to "Just adopt!" is recognised as being utterly inappropriate in its simplistic dismissal of the very real emotional and practical difficulties that hang on such a decision. Advice to just have a baby adopted really doesn’t strike me as any more OK. Nor is advice to just undergo a procedure that almost everyone would see as having at least some moral implications and that would present the risk of miscarrying the fetus that wasn’t aborted as well as the one that was. And as for just loving them both anyway – you know what? I’ll bet they do, lawsuit or no lawsuit.

Which brings me to the other thing that really bothered me – the assumption that, because they didn’t want two babies, this must mean that they’ve designated a Wanted Twin and an Unwanted Reject and made certain both know exactly what their role in the family is. To read a lot of the comments, you’d think the parents had already had the T-shirts made up to differentiate the two. (One commenter even stated her belief that the judge should make any financial reimbursement to the couple conditional on them doing so. Huh?!?) Once again – I don’t believe that loving both your children and wishing you had never been put in the position of having to deal with two at once are mutually exclusive emotions. It’s nice, sometimes, to act as though life were really that simple, but it just isn’t.

None of this is to say that I believe there are no questions to be asked about how the pair are acting and whether these actions are justified. It’s to say that, since none of us knows the couple, their parenting skills, or their side(s) of the story, I don’t believe we are in a position to assume we have answers to those questions. Especially not answers as dismissive and simplistic as many people seemed to be rushing to provide.

I am having a rather pregnancy-oriented week. Tuesday evening was my first NCT class, this morning was my 32-week antenatal appointment (bog-standard stuff, all going smoothly), and tomorrow (all day) will be the second NCT class. On top of this, I recently received a letter from the health visitor, inviting me to some sort of meet-the-health-visitors session which was due to be held on Wednesday morning. However, since I seemed to be taking enough time off work this week already and there’s a repeat session in a month’s time, by which time I will have finished work, I decided to go for that one instead. Meanwhile, for anyone interested in what really happens at NCT classes, including myself, here’s an account of the evening.

The class was held at the teacher’s house, which is one of those awkward places with a name rather than a number. I’d anticipated that it might be difficult to find, but figured that I’d drive up and down the street (literally, The Street, to give you an idea of how small the village is) until I spotted it. What I hadn’t taken into account was that villages so small that they name their houses rather than their streets tend not to have much in the way of street lighting. Reading house names from the car window was completely impossible. From the number of cars inching their way veeerrrrryyyy slooowwwwlllyyyy down the street, it did look as though I wasn’t the only one having this difficulty – I rolled down my window to catch one of them in passing, confirmed that the couple in it were indeed here for the meeting, and waited while they phoned the teacher to clarify which house it was. When I’d managed to find a place to park a few yards up the road and made my way cautiously back down the street in the near-total darkness, hoping I didn’t step in a puddle, I discovered that there was another complication in finding the correct house which I’d been lucky enough to avoid; apparently, somebody else further down the road had decided to give their house the same house name, despite knowing that it had already been taken. I can’t help wondering whether they ever regret that decision when yet another group of pregnant women and partners turn up on their doorstep all ready to hear about pelvic floor exercises.

As we got in, we all had to write our names, due dates, and contact details on a big sheet of paper on the wall with marker pen, which, believe me, is not quite the best way to write something in which accurate legibility is as essential as it is in an e-mail address. Once we were all settled, the teacher introduced herself as Philippa and apologised in advance for any trouble caused by the children and pets lurking in corners of the household. Then she got us to go round the room stating our names, where we were from and how we’d felt driving here tonight. ("Lost." "Hoping I didn’t crash the car in the rain." "Full – I had to eat dinner very quickly before coming out.") Then she got a small stuffed toy, introduced it as Cheryl, put it on the floor, and got the men to arrange themselves around it in order of distance/direction they’d had to travel to get here and each tell us their name and the name of their partner. (She stood in for Barry, just in case I was bothered by not having anyone to stand up and state our names on my behalf. Can’t say I was, but it was a kind thought.) Then the women had to arrange themselves along the sofa in order of due date and each give our names, due dates, and partner’s name. (I’ve got the latest due date. Bah! I hate being last for anything. I go into total childish mode and regress back to the experience of being picked last for games or watching everyone else in my class get their driving licence before me. Now I’ll have to watch all the other women giving birth and showing their babies off before I can do the same. Oh, well – I suppose, looking at it another way, I’ve got a three-year head start on motherhood compared to any of them.) Then we stood in a circle and tossed Cheryl from one person to another, with the person who threw her having to say the name of the person they were throwing her to.

Unless I’ve forgotten anyone, which is entirely possible and will be embarrassing if so, there are four and a half couples in the group (me being the half). There would have been five and a half, but one women jumped the gun and had her baby a month early without benefit of NCT classes; hopefully she and the baby will be joining usat a slightly later stage so that she doesn’t miss out on all the fun of meeting people. I will come back and edit these details if it turns out I’ve got them wrong, but I believe the current cast of pregnant characters consists of Fiona, who is a teacher and who is due in about a week and a half (it’s going to be neck-and-neck with the end of the classes for her, and she might well end up bringing the baby to the breastfeeding class to get some practical experience); Alex, who is due to have a Caesarean for breech/oblique presentation on what will probably be the 16th of October although this still remains to be finalised; Moira, who is due some time between Alex and Jo and who just moved in to the area to join her partner a couple of days earlier, which I’m pleased about as she’s actually in the same town as me and I’d been worried everyone would all be miles away from me what with me doing the class that wasn’t nearest to me; and Jo, who is due a few days before me and lives out on the other side of the town I live in. That’s all I can remember in terms of differentiating detail. The men are Sean (x2), James, and Richard, but they’re even more of an undifferentiated mass in my mind – I could match a couple of them up with their partners, but that’s about all so far.

Once we’d got that far, we were divided into two separate groups (men and women) and issued with wall chart sheets and marker pens in order to make lists of what burning concerns we wanted to cover during the classes, while Philippa got us drinks and biscuits. I didn’t have anything particular to contribute to this, being along mainly for the social life, but the other four between them drew up a list covering issues including but not limited to "What do I pack for the hospital?" "Where should I give birth?" "Who decides whether or not we get episiotomies?" and "What’s this about a letter from the health visitor, and why haven’t I had one?"

Then the men were called back in with their list, and we ran through them quickly (noting the existence of the items on the list for future reference, rather than discussing them at that point) and moved on to talking a bit about the evening’s main topic, which was that of how our bodies and our lives changed during pregnancy. Philippa invited us all to think of how we felt things had changed for us since we became pregnant – more chocolate? Changes at work? Being treated differently? Emotional changes? Difficult decisions about which pushchair to buy?

"I was looking in the rear-view mirror the other day," one man told us, "and it suddenly hit me that in a few weeks’ time, there was going to be a little face staring back at me." I thought that was really sweet. It didn’t seem quite the moment to point out that, in fact, babies are supposed to go in rear-facing car seats and all he’d actually see would be the handle.

We were then divided into two groups again, though this time purely by where we were sitting on the sofa rather than by gender, and the group I was in was given a large poster of the torso of a non-pregnant woman in cross-section with a selection of cardboard arrows Blu-Tacked to it with names of body parts on them. The other group had a similar poster of a pregnant woman. The idea was to stick all the arrows on correctly so that they all pointed to the bits they named. Just as I was wondering whether it would look too pushy if I mentioned my somewhat relevant qualifications for this particular task, someone in my group actually asked, half-jokingly, "Is anyone here a doctor?" and I confessed to the fact and stuck all the labels on and assured one of the men that the picture of the spine was, indeed, a picture of a spine and not a picture of a lobster (um. Huh?) and hoped that I hadn’t got any of them wrong, since that really would have made me look somewhat silly. Still, Philippa seemed happy with where they all were, so either I was right about them all or else she didn’t notice the mistakes.

Philippa then put the two pictures side by side and used the comparison to talk about the ways our body changes – massive uterus, compressed stomach, bladder and bowels almost squashed out of the picture, perineum bearing startling amounts of weight. To illustrate the last, she showed us an impromptu pelvic floor made out of an old pair of tights and loaded it up with a sack of potatoes the weight of an average full-term baby, a pack of currants the weight of an average full-term placenta, a bottle of water the weight of the average full-term amount of amniotic fluid, and some other appropriate foodstuff the weight of an average full-term gravid uterus. Then she sent one of the men round the circle so that we could all have a feel of how much it weighed. A good illustration of the necessity of pelvic floor exercises!

We spent the rest of the session talking about all those physical changes and the various effects of them in practice, as well as the importance of leaning forward as much and as often as possible (to encourage the baby to settle into the right position). Philippa closed things by asking us all to name somewhere where we were looking forward to taking the baby once it was born, at which everyone looked rather blank and half the class said they were thinking more in terms of staying in with it and slumping on the sofa (or staying in slumped on the sofa themselves while their partner took the baby somewhere). I also hadn’t thought much about specific places to take the baby – just a general awareness that at some point in the future, whenever I go to the usual sorts of places I go to, there will be, for better or worse, a baby to take along. I suppose the one I’ve been looking forward to is Jamie’s Tumbletots class – there are already several babies there (to the point where the staff have actually set up a sort of unofficial creche with mats at the back for them to wriggle about and play on while their older siblings climb on the equipment), and, for the past few times we’ve been there, I’ve been looking at those babies and thinking about how it’s soon going to be us bringing one along.

Jamie was already in bed by the time I got back. I went up to see him, and he put his little hand-held light on my head.

"What’s dat?" he demanded.

"That’s a light that you’ve put on top of my head." (I realised afterwards that what he’d actually wanted to ask about was the picture of wolves on my T-shirt – I’d changed my T-shirt to go to the class, so it wasn’t the one I’d been wearing during the day. Jamie has proved a truly wonderful fan of my eclectic T-shirt collection. He’s always wanting to know what the pictures are or what the writing says.)

"How does a number 8 go?"

I drew a number 8 in the air for him, with an appropriate running commentary on its various contortions. Then, at his request, I progressed to number 9 and number 10 and number 11. Then he noticed we’d missed some, and went back to cover some earlier numbers. Then I rather reluctantly brought myself to call a halt – I hadn’t had dinner yet, after all, and Jamie’s interest in numbers was capable of far outlasting mine. I hugged him good night, and went downstairs. The best bit of antenatal classes – the bit you don’t get the first time round – is having a child that wonderful to come home to.